The dark side of fixing health problems with lifestyle adjustments: your life becomes boring and monotonous.

Lifestyle adjustments often get heralded as these pure and holistic methods to treat your mental and physical health problems. Something about a kind of triumph of personal responsibility, combined with avoiding pharmacological burden (which may or may not be a good thing depending on your POV).

I have personal experience with this, and it's not all sunshine and roses, and to be honest, it can be a giant pain in the ass. It shouldn't be that hard to see why.

Strict diet for GERD = extremely hard or impossible to eat out. Need to eat at specific times to avoid getting too full or too hungry, and to digest sufficiently before bed. This further impairs ability to socialize.

Daily long walks for GERD/insomnia/stress = takes a big chunk out of your day. Gets extremely boring after a while. You can only listen to so many podcasts.

Daily meditation for stress = more chunks of your day eaten up. Gets really boring after a while.

Strict sleep hygiene for insomnia = limited opportunity for engaging in socializing or hobbies after work. This one is a super hot topic, obviously, because treating sleep with medication is polarizing. But it's obvious to me at least why patients balk at this, even if you believe sleep hygiene is super effective for everyone. Many people don't enjoy what they spend their waking hours doing, their jobs, and this is a source of mental anguish in and of itself. Then being told it's a medical necessity that you come home and start on a trajectory towards bedtime within a few short hours is just an added kick in the nads. Watching TV isn't just some tawdry prurient waste of time, it's a way to engage in culture, have stuff to talk about with people, enjoy art. Sometimes before bed is the only time you have to do that. Seeing friends being relegated to an activity you only do on Sat or Sun because there's not enough time to do that and come home AND go to bed with no screens with on weekdays is, well, shitty.

Before long you're just living an extremely deprived, monotonous and depressing life. There's nothing to celebrate about this, in my opinion. This can become as much of a leech on quality of life as the original health problems themselves. Sure, we choose these things probably because the health problems themselves are slightly worse if left unchecked. I'd feel 95% like shit, acutely, all the time if I didn't do these things, and I feel 75-80% like shit, just a lot of the time, when I do. So, worth it, I guess. But not the rosiest comparison of all.

Eventually you run out of ways to make it better. I can predict some responses to this cynical outlook: "Well, you don't have to live like that necessarily, what if you just *suggestions for additional highly specific and regimented ways to structure your already over-structured life*."

I don't know where I'm going with this, this is mostly a rant, and IDK why I'm posting it here. Kind of interested in a general audience's take on it instead of one of the health problem Subreddits.